Art in Review

Last spring Gagosian gave over much of its uptown gallery to a coolly anarchistic group show called “Beneath the Underdog,” which included many young artists associated with the New York art world’s professional demimonde. This fall, in the same space, the gallery has a posthumous survey of work by a father of them all — or maybe a revered older brother — Steven Parrino.

Killed in a motorcycle accident in 2005 when he was in his 40s, Mr. Parrino left behind a quarter-century’s worth of art that has only recently taken center stage in the United States. The work still awaits sifting, but from an early point it used many of the elements in circulation now: Minimalism, post-punk music, Warhol, performance, cultural necrophilia, comic books, adolescence, rebellion, trauma, collaboration. Aaron Young’s recent chopper extravaganza at the Park Avenue Armory, with the glam quotient extracted, is only the most obvious example of new art that falls somewhere in Mr. Parrino’s purview.

In attitude, he was like Richard Prince without the smirk. Mr. Parrino’s spiritual America wasn’t a tinkling cymbal. It was a negative sublime. His driving perspective wasn’t willful misanthropy but what he called “post-punk Existentialism.” In this view the Hell’s Angels weren’t just specimens in a critique. They were people — artists — you wanted to know.

The Gagosian show covers a fair amount of ground, much of it familiar. It focuses on Mr. Parrino’s paintings in black and silver, with the canvas pulled halfway off the stretcher or, in the case of circular paintings, pinched at the center and twisted. The effect is less cruel than comedic, like early Frank Stellas messed up in a friendly tussle.

Of more immediate interest is the wealth of works on paper, from early drawings of words to pop-pornography collages and videos. As an ensemble, it reads like a stream-of-consciousness journal of the artist’s interests and concerns, a valuable resource.

Gagosian presents all this with its customary immaculate finesse, which is, of course, a problem. Live anarchy is missing. In a 1998 note about arranging the pickup of work for a European solo exhibition, Mr. Parrino wrote to a dealer: “Nothing needs to be protected. Don’t worry about damaging anything. (Damage is good.) Nothing will be for sale. All will be thrown out after the show. Nothing has value. This will be one of my BEST shows.” I bet it was. I wish I’d seen it. HOLLAND COTTER

CHRIS MARKER

Staring Back

Peter Blum Chelsea

526 West 29th Street

Peter Blum SoHo

99 Wooster Street

Through Nov. 1

Chris Marker’s “Staring Back” is a meditative, deep-fall show. The faces in the dozens of black-and-white photographs of unnamed people that line the walls of Peter Blum’s two galleries are like leaves on the surface of a reflecting pool, bright against dark.

Mr. Marker, born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve in France in 1921, is best known for his innovative films. Cinematic equivalents of a radical kind of creative nonfiction, they are often partly autobiographical and move vertiginously between present and past, until the two are one. This show, Mr. Marker’s first full-scale exhibition of photographs, originally organized by Bill Horrigan for the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, does more or less the same thing.

The pictures, which cover more than 40 years, are the record of a life almost inseparable from art. A French Resistance fighter in World War II, Mr. Marker was loosely associated with Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais in the 1960s, but he spent most of his time filming political activism. Pictures in the Blum show include shots of antiwar demonstrations in Washington in 1967 and others of Parisian protests against French domestic policies in 2005. It is hard, at a glance, to tell that the pictures come from very different eras.

Many of these photographs are stills that Mr. Marker has culled from his films. So are some of the portraits that make up most of the show. They range over many years and many places. Almost all were taken of subjects on the move, active, in the middle of life: The digital printing process used for the prints leaves some faces blurred. A few people are recognizable (Simone Signoret, Salvador Dalí). Most others — a young Asian musician, a Mexican laborer, a fashion model, a monk on Mount Athos in Greece — are not, and no names and dates are supplied.

It’s possible, I guess, to dismiss “Staring Back” as a rewarmed “Family of Man,” though only if you know nothing about Mr. Marker’s work or that 1955 show by Edward Steichen.

Anyway, the comparison becomes moot in the pictures that end the show, which is also a book. These are photographs of animals: a seal, a chimpanzee and several cats, long a favorite Marker subject. The direct looks and gestures of animals, he says in a wall text, “point to the truest of humanity, better than humanity itself.” In this show, which is about memory and change and strife and confusion, theirs are the steady faces for all seasons. HOLLAND COTTER

The de Kooning shows now at Gagosian and at L&M Arts focus on an Abstract Expressionist at the very end of his storied career; for a sense of beginning, consider this exhibition of Stephen Pace’s paintings from the 1950s. Boisterous, confident and colorful, they show this second-generation New York School artist trying on all sorts of styles.

The works from early in the decade have a masklike, totemic quality, reminiscent of Gorky and early Pollock. A 1951 painting made jointly by Mr. Pace and Frank Lobdell, while they were working with other American artists in a communal studio in Paris, displays the jagged verticals of a Clyfford Still. In the mid-’50s, Mr. Pace made liberal use of the palette knife, building up moody clusters similar to those in Joan Mitchell’s canvases.

A showstopping work from 1959, a centrifuge for decisive brush strokes of uniform width, reveals Hans Hofmann’s influence. (Mr. Pace, now 88, was one of his star pupils.) No matter who, or what, inspired them, these works have certain hallmarks: a strong verticality on the left side of the canvas, and a fish-pond palette of dark blues and greens, with pops of bright orange.

The latest works here, two paintings from 1962, have a more organic feel and a diffuse, cursivelike slant. Later, when Mr. Pace spent more time in rural Maine than at the Cedar Tavern, he turned to representation. This exhibition proves that when he wanted to, he could gesture with the best of them. KAREN ROSENBERG

ADAM ADACH

Karin Sander

D’Amelio Terras

525 West 22nd Street, Chelsea

Through Nov. 3

In this pair of solo shows, two midcareer European artists use painting to convey the experience of international travel.

The Warsaw painter Adam Adach spent three months living and working in the Bronx, drawing on his own photographs of the area, as well as on newspaper clippings detailing major events in Europe. His imagery veers from meditative portraits of children hefting stones on the beach to a masked protester hurling rocks during the most recent G8 summit.

Mr. Adach means to elide the distance between Eastern Europe and the Bronx, though his paintings might scare off visitors to both regions. Three large paintings of Pelham Bay have flattened, semi-abstract passages that recall Peter Doig’s science-fiction-inspired landscapes. “Day After/Pelham Bay/Just Before Sunset” (2007) laces the garbage-strewn shoreline with radioactive yellow-orange. Sooty grays prevail in the historical scenes, with one memorable exception: the aftermath of a chemical spill, depicted as a shower of pastel confetti.

In the smaller Project Gallery, the German artist Karin Sander has installed a new group of her “Mailed Paintings”: primed, store-bought canvases sent from international locations without any kind of protective covering. A rectangular painting sent from Colombia has nary a scratch, while a circular one that passed through Bonn and Berlin in Germany and Gmuden, Austria, bears a Fontana-esque slash.

These bruised and fingerprinted monochromes bring to mind the recent acts of violence against works of art in a Swedish gallery and a French museum. Here, the responsibility lies with the artist, or maybe the post office. KAREN ROSENBERG

CARSTEN NICOLAI

PaceWildenstein

534 West 25th Street, Chelsea

Through Nov. 3

Where are the beanbag chairs? Carsten Nicolai’s black-and-white light projection “Fades” (2006) is so pleasantly mesmerizing, you want to lie back and surrender to its soothing effects. White, soft-focus forms continually flow this way and that against a dark background, morphing from large, ghostly lozenge shapes to partially dissolved grids.

The experience is enhanced, though not greatly, by white noise coming from speakers and by a slight mist pumped into the room in which the projected light beams become visible. It’s basically like an excellent, much enlarged screen saver.

That there are no beanbags may be because Mr. Nicolai’s aims are more scientific than psychedelic. Based in Berlin, he is widely known in Europe as an electronic musician and multimedia artist. The survey on his Web site (carstennicolai.de) of previous works, which combine visual, sculptural and sonic effects and elegant Minimalist design, suggests that this show — only his second Manhattan solo show — does not do full justice to his stylish inventiveness.

“Static Balance,” the exhibition’s other major piece, consists of a pair of standing, sharply curved mirrored walls that face each other. Together, they’re like a poor man’s Anish Kapoor. Standing within the curve of either wall, you can hear a faint static noise, but otherwise the “acoustic field of varying density” that a gallery release says is supposed to happen remains elusive. It would be interesting to see how a dog reacted. KEN JOHNSON AMIR ZAKI

Perry Rubenstein

527 West 23rd Street, Chelsea

Through Nov. 21

Los Angeles has its own, car-culture brand of street photography. Over the last 40 years buildings have replaced people in photographs by Ed Ruscha, James Welling and Catherine Opie. Amir Zaki extends the tradition with razor-sharp formalist photographs that ripple with noirish undercurrents.

For this show Mr. Zaki shot postwar vernacular architecture — unidentified, often boarded-up gas stations, fast-food restaurants or fortresslike chapels devoid of people — straight on rather than from the dramatic perspectives and angles used in previous works. And in place of formalist pyrotechnics he’s made a foray into semiotics, or at least the type of iconography used by the artist Matt Mullican in the 1980s that was described in semiotic terms. (The gallery sticks with the old-fashioned term “symbols.”)

Cryptic circles, squiggles and strange crosses — a bit like the brands used on cattle — can be detected on the facades and rooftops in place of ordinary signage. Many were put there by Mr. Zaki. Three polyurethane sculptures, mounted on the gallery’s walls and painted in moody designer colors, also function like street emblems, bits of blown-up three-dimensional graffiti.

Where once Mr. Zaki could have been accused of making Los Angeles into a kind of sexy, apocalyptic mecca, now he could come under fire for being too subtle, as the symbols add a bit of mystery to the edifices but not enough to call the buildings or the urban landscape into serious question.

Nonetheless, his photographs function very much the way Ms. Opie’s images of houses in Beverly Hills do: as quirky portraits or near-sculptures. They add a cogent chapter to the story of how Los Angeles presents itself to a photographer moving through the city. MARTHA SCHWENDENER